The world going "digital", reminds me of an anime I saw a few years back... Well who knows if the world is going "digital", but I can tell you it would take a few hundred years before what I think you are thinking will happen.

Recently i have noticed less and less people actually buy dvd's or bluray's and less people use flash drives personally i haven't used either for a while i use streaming sites for my movies and email myself information. Is the world going to go completely digital?

yes it is sir, read fahrenheit 451 by ray bradbury the world will become this...anyways blu-ray quality can't be streamed sry to break the news bud that quality is god-like it surpasses 1080p its not 1080p ...you can't stream that quality anyways sooo that will never be streamed due to profits and bandwidth issues.

Blu-ray has a max bit-rate of 40Mbps.
My home broadband is 60Mbps and could be upgraded to 120Mbps for a fairly reasonable price. I can stream BR media perfectly.

The cost of bandwidth to stream a full BR disc of data (25GB, realistically this would be less) starts at $3 on Amazon EC2 on it's most expensive tier, and would drop to $1.75 for a medium sized provider (4000 full BR streams a month). This price is reasonable for rental service on a Pay Per View model.

In short, this is not only already possible but it is also practical for some business models.

Edit: As UHDTV was mentioned, UHDTV 4k has been compressed to a 250 Mbs format.
There are already quite a few Countries/Cities where this is already available. The main issue obviously being the lack of UHDTV capable displays and the current cost of bandwidth making it unsuitable for video streaming services such as YouTube. This is one area broadcast TV has an advantage as they only have to send the signal once. While it is while away from being common, we managed to use it quite nicely in the 2012 Olympics :D.

Sir, I see your valid points. Pay close attention to what i stated. He couldn't stream it specifically.

Profit issues include distribution of proper BD quality computers and proper ISP speeds to stream. Not everyone has these matter of fact most Americans don't have these. I can totally see it being used a on a larger scale in the foreseen future.(actually its predicted for 2025 to be widely because of 100mbps capability prediction)

Then thinking about how many streaming providers would have to upgrade their equipment and those costs. Then the consideration of how many people actually would offer the service.

Then the fact of how much total it smacks your bank just to get all the prerequisites to stream blu-ray quality will pack a whallop like christmas shopping that it will be difficult for the average American as it is right now to stream blu-ray.

Actually yes, the world is going to "cloud" and streaming computing. I actually work a lot with datacenters for my job and I can say from experience that my business is booming. The owner of my company has had to turn down work because there are so many new datacenters being built. Part of the reason for this big boom in datacenter construction is the increasing demand for remote memory such as cloud storage. The other reason is to provide backup/redundancy if a single site fails.

So no, it doesn't seem like optical media and the like are disappearing, they are intentionally being phased out. Think of it from a business perspective -- no DVDs to burn, no boxes, no shipping costs, no warehouse stockboys, no warehouses, no manufacturing facilities, fewer employees to pay and less environmental impact -- that means more of the licensing fees make it to the owners pocket. A media executive would have to be high in order to go against that. It is also easier for the average user to access data. A lot of major tech companies are actively pushing for cloud computing. If you look at the technical specs of mobile devices such as phones and tablets, they are actually coming with less memory now than they did a couple years ago, because there is a much greater reliance on streaming data -- and it forces users to subscribe to services which do stream data.

Of course there will always be a need for physical media for very private materials or backups, but physical storage media will eventually become the same as sheet film or VHS -- rare and only for specialty purposes.

Recently i have noticed less and less people actually buy dvd's or bluray's and less people use flash drives personally i haven't used either for a while i use streaming sites for my movies and email myself information. Is the world going to go completely digital?

I noticed this is happening. Today, I went to a pawn shop and found a few bluray movie I wanted to see. I got five for twenty dollars. Common sense would dictate that the movies would at least have a scratch, but they were almost brand-new. The only thing missing is the plastic wrapped around it. I think people bought the blurays for the digital copy and sold it when they got it. I can't complain. I got five movies for 4/5th the price of one at Walmart.

If your seeing this now then i would have to say "better late then never".

I deal a lot with electronics, audio/video equipment to be accurate so i'm always looking at advancements in technology to keep up with my job. Good example of advancement i saw about a month ago stating a new process which sends information at fiber optic speeds over and normal Ethernet (Cat6) cabling and without slowing down normal Ethernet activities. So for all the people that dumped money into fiber i just started laughing.

Spring forum cleaning! To keep the forums neat and tidy we only keep 6 months worth of threads since its May 19, 2013 [5/19/13] we will keep only keep posts open from December 19, 2012 [12/19/12]. Please feel free to recreate any thread closed, as long as someone else didn't open another similar one before you.